Shield Your Business from Data Loss with a Sensible Backup Strategy

Many hosting companies offer business programs that tout the use of cutting-edge hardware and software, but the reality is that every top-notch hosting vendor should use the most recent and greatest technology. Business leaders should anticipate this as a minimum requirement but, a far more important question is: Does my hosting provider implement an intelligent backup strategy to ensure that my files and information are secure from loss?

Are You Protected?

Ask your hosting company if a business continuity solution is offered with your hosting plan. Amazingly, many companies do not include basic data backup as a regular service. Offering high-quality, guaranteed data loss prevention is often complicated and pricey for the hosting company, but this is protection you cannot afford to go without.

Already Protected? To What Degree?

If your hosting supplier offers backup services, do some research to prevent unexpected hassles and future aggravations. Confirm that you can rely on your provider to frequently and properly backup important computer data. Think about the following:

How long it will take to restore from backup?

Your present hosting supplier may deliver backup services, but you should understand the technology they implement to guard you. If they use tape backup, it might be hours before you get your data back when you need it. Your business may find itself at the bottom of a long list of customers expecting repair of servers, programs, and data if a issue takes place. Take the steps to understand what you can expect of the hosting provider if repairing from backup is needed to prevent a disruptive business emergency.

What does the backup plan include?

Examine the kind of data and information that is secured. Not all providers allow you to restore individual files or your whole server. If you need to recover immediately, you want a provider that gives you the option of restoring individual files or the full server. Moreover, find out how far back the backup goes. There is a big difference between 4 days and 4 weeks.

Is there an additional backup off-site?

Consult your provider if their business continuity solution features an off-site component. True business continuity solutions incorporate reproduction of all data and virtual servers to a production data center in a type that permits them to be booted up there in the event of a long term failure.

Application-consistent or Crash-consistent?

If you are hosting virtual servers, this could be a very important question. Make sure your hosting company takes application-consistent snapshots of your server. If they don’t, you may get a perfectly unusable restore. Crash-consistent snapshots are a point-in-time backup of your server. All Exchange, SQL, and disk transactions are left incomplete, creating damaged databases and files. An application-consistent snapshot quiesces or closes all transactions to disk, enabling you to restore the server with zero corruption.

Quick Checklist for Acceptable Backup Provisions

If you’re overwhelmed with questions to ask and not sure of the answers to look for, you can start with this quick reference guideline of minimum provisions:

• The supplier should perform a daily backup of your entire server.
• Data needs to be retained for at least 4 weeks.
• You should have the option to restore anything from a single file to an entire server.
• Data should be replicated off-site.
• The provider should take application-consistent snapshots.

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